It’s amazing to think that not long ago, when he was in the Louisiana House of Representatives and known back then as one of the leading members of the “fiscal hawk” contingent in that body, that we’d see Cameron Henry as the biggest obstacle to positive change in this state. But now, with Henry reigning as the Senate President for the third year, we’re pretty much there.

And not really for any new reasons, either.

For example, in his State of the State address to open this year’s legislative session, Gov. Jeff Landry put out a message that Louisiana needs a budget which is leaner and targeted toward the needs of productive people rather than toward a massive welfare state, and that in order to compete nationally the state must continue driving toward eliminating the state income tax.

Well, that’s not going to happen if Henry has anything to say about it. Here’s what he told the left-wing blog the Louisiana Illuminator…

“We won’t do it at all this year,” Senate President Cameron Henry, R-Metairie, said when asked about the chances of repealing the state income tax. … Henry didn’t rule out the matter for consideration next year but said a modest income tax rate reduction would be more likely than a full repeal. He noted that one-half of a percentage point reduction in the income tax rate costs the state roughly $500 million annually.

We can have big arguments over whether the state can “afford” to ditch the income tax, which remains one of the biggest repellents to economic growth. But we’d note that here’s somebody who styled himself as a fiscal conservative at one point in his political career and now he’s talking about what tax costs “cost” the state, as though it’s the state’s money and not the property of the people who earned it.

This guy has an R next to his name but he sure does sound like his Democrat friends.

But Henry is holding onto his “fiscal conservatism” in one respect, which is that he absolutely refuses to fund the LA GATOR Scholarship program, which is the state’s school choice initiative. Henry is sticking by his position that he wants to starve the scholarship program so it only has enough money to fund private education options for kids in failing schools, meaning that rather than a true school choice program it’s just an old-school voucher plan.

School vouchers were a stupid political play by Bush Republicans 20 years ago. Essentially, vouchers were about giving Democrat parents the option to get their kids out of Democrat public schools and into Republican private schools. Except Republican parents weren’t all that fired up about their kids’ schools being filled up with Democrat kids – and having their tax dollars confiscated from them to pay for it. Which is why we’re now about full-on school choice in the form of educational savings accounts and true scholarship programs which are available to everybody.

That way, Republican parents essentially get a writeoff for their kids’ education, which means they actually get something out of being Republicans.

Louisiana’s public schools are getting a lot better, and that’s a massive success story state superintendent Cade Brumley and everybody working with him can take credit for. But school choice plans like LA GATOR don’t detract from that. In fact, they make for a hyper-competitive environment which will serve the kids better than a monolithic public school system with a few private schools for rich people and Catholics ever could.

Except Henry wants to protect the public schools.

It’s crazy. He represents a state senate district in which practically all of the parents, save for a few who can’t afford the tuition, send their kids to private and Catholic schools. And he won’t let Landry fund the LA GATOR program so some of his own constituents can get a break?

Cruel story, bro.

And why? Because “Louisiana doesn’t have the money.” In a $44 billion budget there isn’t an extra $45 million to fund that scholarship program. Yeah, OK.

When he’s standing against the very obvious solution, which is to get competitive with tax policy so that the state’s economy grows and people move in rather than leaving.

We could do a whole separate column about Henry’s clandestine – and not-so-clandestine – efforts to destroy party primary elections in Louisiana. We probably will soon.

If this continues we’re really going to need to talk about who’s going to run and take this guy out so he doesn’t get to spend four more years as the Senate President. Making major reforms seems more or less impossible with Cameron Henry holding the gavel.